New York Mets: The Sad Realization

I was watching this team play baseball yesterday in what was a must-win game for the Mets. They knew how big these next six games were going to be. They needed to show in last night's game that they were ready to do anything to win and that they would not go down without a fight. But they didn't do that.

At times this season the Mets have looked like a team that battles back or fights to stay in the game. But something has happened to that team, and whatever they had at the beginning of the year is gone. It happened around the time Mike Pelfrey started to fall apart, and around the time Carlos Beltran and Luis Castillo came back.

I don't think Beltran and Castillo are clubhouse poisons who made this team go into a tail spin. They haven't played great, but still that's no excuse for why the rest of the team has struggled so much. It could have been that when these two guys came back, the team just shifted into a different gear. The players figured, now that we have them back, they can take some of the load off of us. It doesn't really make sense, but a lot of things the Mets have done this year haven't made sense.

I came to the sad realization a couple days ago that this team isn't going anywhere. The Mets don't have what it take to make the playoffs with the type of attitude they have right now. I'm not the only one who thinks this either. In a recent poll on Mets Paradise, 85 percent of the voters believed the Mets will not make the playoffs.

This doesn't mean that I'm going to stop watching them or stop attending games. This is my team, and if it is going down, I'm going down with it. I love the Mets, and that wouldn't change whether they were in the World Series or in last place.